Sony

Late last week, TechCrunch had a chat with former Sony Pictures Chief Digital Strategy Officer Mitch Singer to discuss the motivations that likely went into Sony deciding to pull “The Interview” from theaters and the implications of that decision. Read More

From the Sony hack coverage to Instagram being valued at $35 billion, here are the top stories from 12/13-12/19.
1. Sony was hacked. Sony cancels the theatrical release of The Interview after threats from hackers. The FBI blames North Korea for the hack. Obama says Sony made a mistake in canceling the release of The Interview (and calls James Franco, James Flacco). Sony’s CEO responds… Read More

Here is the latest twist in the ongoing Sony hacking story: after the FBI alleged that North Korea was indeed behind the attack on Sony, North Korea today categorically denied having anything to do with it. According to a BBC report, North Korea’s foreign ministry went as far threatening “grave consequences” and demanding a joint investigation into the allegations.
North… Read More

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Alexia Tsotsis, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, December 19, 2014. Our end-of-year show, produced as RogenGate broke and the President held a press conference. It may have occurred to some employees at Sony that they would be better off with some form of corporate SnapChat. It may have occurred to the President that there’s… Read More

Sony CEO Michael Lynton blamed theaters for the studio’s decision to pull out from the scheduled theatrical release of The Interview this Christmas. He told CNN in an exclusive interview that Sony had no other choice after a slew of theaters decided to not show the film. Read More

The battle between Sony and what the FBI believes are North Korean hackers may be at its end, but the war for the security of the enterprise is just getting started.
Companies have been rapidly transitioning their legacy systems to modern IT technology like cloud services, hoping to save money and improve performance in an increasingly competitive world. And while security has always been one… Read More

The FBI has officially put the blame on the North Korean government for the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack which resulted in the theft of mass amounts of personal and commercial data, as well as the shut down of Sony Pictures work computers. A group calling itself the “Guardians of Peace” had claimed responsibility.
In the FBI’s full official statement, which is now… Read More

Sony Pictures might be spared further embarrassment resulting from future data dumps, according to emails received by Sony executives today. CNN reports that Sony execs got a new email that matches the pattern, language and email list of previous threats and demands, but this one apparently praises Sony for its “very wise” choice in cancelling the release of “The… Read More

She works for Sony Pictures. She said she’s now working in an office on lock-down, a throwback to an earlier time when the Internet wasn’t around.
“We are stuck in 1992 over here,” she said.
She requested anonymity but agreed to talk a bit about her day-to-day experience as a Sony Pictures Employee post-hack. She said things were getting back to normal and were, in… Read More

U.S. officials say they believe that North Korea’s government was involved in the large-scale hack of Sony servers, which led to the leak of troves of Sony data from emails to unreleased projects, according to the NYT.
Federal cyber-security sources say that there is evidence indicating that the hack was routed through computers in Singapore, Thailand, Italy, Bolivia and Cyprus, ABC reports. Read More

Following threats from hackers responsible for large-scale server breaches and leaks at Sony, the entertainment studio has made the official decision to cancel The Interview, which was set to be released on Christmas Day. Read More

The one puzzle piece I needed to complete my Ultimate Home Theater setup has finally arrived: Plex is available for PlayStation 4 and PS3 in the U.K, Europe and Asia, with an app live in the PlayStation Store. The Plex app for Sony’s latest console follows the launch of the media streamer on Xbox One back in October. At the time, Plex’s co-founder Scott Olechowski hinted that a… Read More

More Sony news. In a pre-CES announcement that’s perhaps hoping to draw eyeballs away from the toxic fallout of the Sony Pictures email hack — or, more likely, hoping to suck up a little oxygenated publicity ahead of the consumer electronic scrum in January — Sony has today announced its own take on Google Glass. Read More

Leaked emails from the Sony Pictures hack have uncovered several acquisitions made by Snapchat, as well as plans for a music feature and meetings to discuss partnerships with Twitter.
According to emails between Snapchat, Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, and Snapchat board member Mitch Lasky, Snapchat bought a QR scanning and iBeacon startup called Scan.me for $14 million in cash, $3… Read More

A threatening message from the Guardians of Peace, the group responsible for hacking into and releasing more than a terabyte of Sony’s internal data so far, is alleging an attack on movie theaters that plan to screen Seth Rogen and James Franco’s movie “The Interview.”
“The world will be full of fear,” the message, first reported by BuzzFeed, reads. Read More

The Sony hack has taught us so much. It’s taught us to send corporate email as if everyone is reading those emails. It’s taught us that people in Hollywood are just as mean as people in any other industry (and potentially racist). And it’s taught us that Channing Tatum is really enthusiastic about beating “TED” at the box office. Read More

Just one month after striking a distribution partnership with Warner Music Group, Tencent, one of China’s biggest Internet companies and the maker of WeChat, has made a similar deal with Sony Music Entertainment. As with the earlier agreement, Tencent will have the right to distribute Sony Music Entertainment’s catalog through various online channels, including microblogging… Read More

“No one’s private life can totally withstand public scrutiny,” reads an NYT op-ed penned by screenwriter and playwright Aaron Sorkin, angrily blasting the media for reporting the private details revealed through the recent hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment, in what’s shaping up to be one of the largest corporate data breaches to date. “…Every news outlet… Read More

With the horror of the Sony Pictures breach unfolding in slow motion before us, we are reminded that operational security – OpSec – is absolutely key at any company. Whether or not you traffic in high-value data, the expectation that your servers are secure enough and that your data is worthless is foolhardy. You will be compromised and it will hurt. Read More

Sony’s PlayStation Experience is kicking off in Las Vegas today, with a keynote that starts at 10 AM PT. You can tune in to the live stream via Twitch above to catch all the action, which should include a fair number of new game announcements, complete with some early looks at the gameplay and cinematic of next year’s biggest hits.
The PlayStation Experience in a new event, designed… Read More